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Why buy your kid toys when you can make ‘em? Fun to construct and play with - and no guilt when you chuck ‘em into the trash!

Cosmo and I have a moderately cool town going on:

Of course Akiko saw what we were doing and totally put us to shame with a super detailed 9 page fish-market design she found:

All you need is the right paper and a color printer! All the designs are free.

Man, I can’t wait for 3D printers to make it big…

PS: My LD48 entry won! I want to put together a post-comp “special edition” and do the things I ran out of time on, hope to get to that soon. Damn my laziness.

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It’s that time again!  The ludumdare 48 tests your game making mettle.

Well, the competition just started and the theme is “minimalist”.  Hrmmm.

Akiko is providing logistical support in the form of delicious meals which will also be documented.

You can watch my (lack of?) progress in real time here!

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Last week my mom sent me a picture of a ’surprise’ her dog did that had a suspiciously interesting shape. Not to be outdone, I sent her a few of my own. I mean, my dog is even more special.

That’s one smart dog.My mom’s name

Ok, if you hadn’t guessed, these were not exactly totally natural. I used 3dsMax and a font called poo. The text was extruded, a smooth modifier applied, then a material with ‘noise’ applied to the bump and displacement properties.

The possibilities are endless! Well.. I guess what I did is pretty much the end, actually.

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Smartcropper V2.00 released

A while back I wrote a freebie utility that checks a series of images and then crops them all to the smallest enclosing rect.

In my BREW phone game making adventures, I had single-image horizontal sprite strips that were wasting a lot of space and added features to handle finding the smallest enclosing rect and writing out an optimized version of the image.

Smart cropper v2 example

8 bit support, color key support (can be used instead of alpha) and some examples were also added.

Download SmartCropper V2.00 with source and examples

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What do programmers do to keep their game programming chops up to snuff? They get together with friends and see who can write a complete game (including making the sound and art) over a weekend in the Ludumdare 48!

The game I made is sort of Bomber man but instead of bombing, you dodge and disarm bombs while saving these rather nasty looking girls.

Hero School

Only download this if you’re comfortable with using files from a .zip and won’t get angry at an occasional expletive.

Download the full ready-to-run game (with C++ source code also included) here. (1.6 MB, for Windows)

You can see my development log here.

If for some reason you want to compile it (like to get it running under linux or OSX, you would need Clanlib)

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Ludumdare

Next weekend is a Ludumdare “make a game in 48 hours” competition! I recommend giving it a shot if you dare.Will I ignore the family all weekend by partaking in this insane masochistic coding session once again? Hrm, not sure yet. Depends on if I get a fun idea for the theme or not I guess.

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My four year old son recently had his preschool “sports day” here in Japan. That means the parents get to sit in the hot sun all day as the kids play Taiko drums, make a human pyramid and wear cool headbands in a relay race.

Usually in a race like this you put your fastest runners last. However, one of teams put their slowest kid on the last leg.

Starting with a good half lap lead she got passed by BOTH the other teams RIGHT before the finish line. I really felt sorry for her as I saw it slowly dawn on her face while the red team was celebrating victory behind her.

Anyway, I took an extraordinary good pic of it so check it out!

Losing can hurt

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Porting a music game!

About eight years ago I played my first game of Dance Dance Revolution. I was waiting for someone in Tokyo when I spotted a lonely machine sitting in a corner. I popped in a 100 yen coin and tried to figure it out. I’ve been a fan since - especially of the ones that don’t make me embarrass myself physically, like Pop’n Music, the Bemani series, Guitar Hero 2 and Gitaroo-Man.

Anyway, I got the opportunity to port a really huge hit in this genre to a mobile phone. I just couldn’t pass it up. Hopefully I can get back into my other projects soon. (Few months?) I’m sort of under NDA so I guess I can’t really talk about it.

Oh, and I’m back from Hong Kong and answering emails and such again. Here is Cosmo in fear at Ocean Park.

Cosmo at Ocean Park HK

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On vacation until the 16th

Hey, I’m in Hong Kong! I won’t be able to answer emails for a few days. I just stopped in long enough to delete some spam from the forums… carry on!

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Sign of the times

As I walked by a parked car the other day I stopped mid stride - a women inside was making wild gestures towards me… was she ok?

After a few moments I realized she had propped her phone on the dash and was using sign language into it during a video call!

Isn’t technology great?

Factoid: Japanese sign language (JSL) is as different from American sign language (ASL) as the spoken language.  But on the bright side, pronunciation should never be a problem…

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